Gosha Rubchinskiy has enjoyed a yearlong homecoming tour, revealing his seasonal collections in cities across his native country, Russia, from west to east. Twelve months ago he selected the stark, strange, intriguingly anachronistic oblast of Kaliningrad, partially because it was once a piece of Germany. (At that show, Rubchinskiy introduced a collaboration with the German brand Adidas, which is ongoing.) Then in June he arced north to St. Petersburg, a city aglow in pale flowers and endless summer twilight. There, too, another highly publicized partnership was launched with Burberry. Those items hit stores just over a week ago; that association continues as well. And on Sunday, in “maybe” his final Russian stop, Rubchinskiy landed in wintry Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest municipality. It is located in the Ural region, and is famous for being the site of the Romanov executions. It is about two hours east of Moscow by plane. It’s so cold in Yekaterinburg right now that residents can walk across its Iset River, which is frozen as solid as the emeralds that were once mined nearby.

Everything in this extended junket has referenced, in some way, Russia’s hosting of the 2018 football (soccer) World Cup. The natural overlap of Rubchinskiy’s skatewear—which bristles with youthful pluck and mildly sober nostalgia—and football kits is evident, though not necessarily in-your-face obvious. But other more nuanced inspirations have found their way into the designer’s beat, such as the emergent rave culture in St. Petersburg as the Soviet Union began to evanesce, for his Spring 2018 collection. In Yekaterinburg—Fall 2018—there were more contemporarily relevant touch points: the era of Boris Yeltsin, a man who was born near Yekaterinburg and who would become Russia’s first president in 1991, and symbolically moving through and on from the ’90s.